Publication details
God above government : Reinterpretation of political governance in the age of right-wing populism and religious legitimization of autonomy in debates about social inequality
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| Year of publication | 2024 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | This paper presents the provisional results of a wide-ranging discursive analysis of elite political and religious figures, parties, think tanks, congregations, and initiatives mainly affiliated with Christian traditions, in the case of two nation-state contexts, the United States and Poland. Demonstrating the cultural and economic intersections of social inequalities and exclusions, when advocating certain models for public-private nexus to address these issues, the shift in the broader political sphere and its religious legitimation toward more authoritative strategies of governance was also be outlined. The comparison of culturally distinct promissory imaginaries and abductive explanations of perceived social crises considering the country's institutional and material settings as well as, position in the global economic context, focusing on religious legitimation or reinterpretation in the pursuit of mobilizing the faithful, enriched thriving research field in two important ways. It lends a necessary material dimension to the discursive struggle over the conceptualization of autonomy, which has been explored in previous years mostly in the surface cultural features of referential social issues in scholarship on the well-known term culture wars. Therefore, the intertwining of economic and cultural autonomy in interpretations of current political and religious elites can shed light on the emergence of new fault lines between conservative religious segments of civil society and political actors championing an economic model of neoliberalism with expanding market rationality across diverse. Following the elucidation of these developments, the paper attempts to move beyond the hitherto mostly formalist understandings of reactionary populism, with a specific focus on the interplay between institutionalized discourse, i.e., dominant ideas persisting in intellectual circles, and the discursive practices through which they attain political salience and popular appeal. Furthermore, the presentation was engaged with the academic debate concerning the transformation of the political culture inextricably tied to social disorganization and atomization, described already at the beginning of the century in a groundbreaking study by Robert Putnam. On a more general level, the presentation thus attempted to provide an answer to the role of religious components and approaches to their investigation, in a socio-political environment aptly conceptualized by Belgian scholar Anton Jäger as "hyper-politics". Such a condition can be simplistically defined as the struggle of political parties that, like other participatory entities, have lost their mass membership, and therefore are forced to reach broad but volatile support through the means of mass communication. This phenomenon is manifested in the pursuit of more direct but often undemocratic instruments of governance, requiring a new conceptualization of autonomy, and seeking further stability in religious cultural models. The concluding part shows that this form of instrumentalization has also consequences on the religious milieu in these countries, specifically, it contributes to the fragmentation of religious communities and the rise of new authorities that play an irreplaceable role in the novel scheme of power. |